16
May
2009
SEF on Joomla
Written by Piet Nutbey   

We receive many questions about SEF. Joomla has its own settings for SEF and there are a few good 3rd party SEF extensions available:

No matter whether you use the Joomla default SEF or a 3rd party SEF, a few things need to be taken care of.

1. in your global configuration you need to set it as the picture below shows:

2. As the yellow exclamation mark in the above picture will show, you will need to rename the file htaccess.txt to .htaccess (Be sure the dot in front of htaccess is there, this is a must!!!)

This should basically get things working for SEF.

Some websites might however give a 500 error. This might be due to a certain setting in the .htaccess file.

On some webservers it is necessary to change your .htaccess file and in particular the rewrite base, that is this part of the .htaccess:

  #  Uncomment following line if your webserver's URL
  #  is not directly related to physical file paths.
  #  Update Your Joomla! Directory (just / for root)
  # RewriteBase /

Uncommenting is done by removing the #

Should you encounter a 500 error, try to change this into:

  #  Uncomment following line if your webserver's URL
  #  is not directly related to physical file paths.
  #  Update Your Joomla! Directory (just / for root)
  RewriteBase /

Sometimes people do not install their Joomla into the root of the webserver, but into a subfolder. this is the case when for instance you have your url in the following way: http://www.yourdomain.com/joomla

In this case when you still encounter a 500 error, you may want to try setting your RewriteBase to:

  #  Uncomment following line if your webserver's URL
  #  is not directly related to physical file paths.
  #  Update Your Joomla! Directory (just / for root)
  RewriteBase /joomla

Of-course should your subfolder be named different than joomla, in the .htaccess you will need to set the appropriate subfolder name.

Then one tip for the 3rd party extension sh404. That has a certain setting for using Apache Rewrite or not. What I often see is that people using sh404 have SEF urls in the following way: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php/blog

As you can see, that index.php is not really friendly. This is a pesky setting that at first is a bit hard to find in sh404. You can do the following in your sh404 component:

 

When you have "extended display" on, click on the sh404 SEF configuration icon. After that, click on the "Advanced" tab. Then set the Rewriting mode to "with .htaccess (mod_rewrite)" as shown on the picture below:

 

After you have done this, click on "Save" at the right top.

In some rare occasions, you could have a chance that no matter what your settings are, you can't get SEF running. It might be the case that your provider does not have Apache (= webserver) mod_rewrite on. This is a necessity for SEF urls to run. If you still encounter errors even after you have tried all that has been written here, inform at your provider if they have Apache and the mod_rewrite module running.

 

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